Last day reflection

So,

It was the last day of summer school, both mine and my kids'. It was weird. We had few plans for the day, John said he'd take care of it. No one wanted to do work of course and they were complaining. I mean, it was the last day of school I wouldn't want to do anything either, but we just had them writing letters either to us or their English teachers next year. It was pretty funny, too. Devon came in and said, "I ain't doin' no work today," which was fine. But, we had the class write these letters and he wrote one sentence and then wrote, "I ain't doin' no work today." I just wanted to read the letter then and whisper in his ear, "uhh, excuse me, Devon, you just did some work."

Anyway, we had the class generate two categories for Jeopardy and John made three other categories. We had Tasha (one of the students) be the host. I think she liked it and found it was a bit difficult controlling the class. Hopefully she'll reflect on that and understand how difficult it is to lead discussions and such.

What was so weird today was that the kids actually did stuff, despite their bitching at the beginning. Jenny and Amanda, two evil girls, were as nice as they get in class. Amanda actually got up and passed out some paper for the letter writing, told people to shush, made pleasant conversation: it was spooky. Jenny was still loud-mouthed, but a little more controlled. After class, too, we had a big gathering where Mr. Myrie (principal) and Kay (director of TEP) spoke to the students/mentors/interns and then had an ice cream party, and the strangest thing happened: Jenny and Amanda came up to me, Dave, and Hannah and gave us all hugs. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Why couldn't they have taken 1/39875th of their niceness today and brought it into class any other day? They were tough. Jenny is smart, but has an absolutely horrid attitude. Amanda can be pleasant sometimes, but she's older than Jenny and doesn't really want to do work.

Frankie had a good day too. This kid is wicked smaht. He sees right through the surface level of stories and goes after the deeper meaning like it's nobody's business. He was in Group 1 for Jeopardy and even his guesses were right. One of the questions was "How did Matzu prepare Stephans eggs in 'The Samurai's Garden'?" (a book they were supposed to read). You can just tell this kid is smart because he always participated in discussion, got that Jeopardy question right and never read the book. He's a cool kid. I would like to hang out with him. He's so little.

I just want to take a moment to give a pimp shout out to my flygirl Fer-vignewton who is the only person reading these. Keep it real.

I read the letters the kids gave, they were cute. It's amazing how much they bitch. Truthfully, we worked the shit out of these kids. They wrote SO freaking much, and we dragged them through it. I believe they are all significantly better writers, but it was still tough. And for all that moaning and whining, in the letters they said that we gave a lot of work, but they liked it, or can see how much better they got. That's interesting, I thought. Cuz as teachers we want everything to be fun and engaging. But, I have to remember that sometimes, they just need to practice and do the work. There actually is something to rote practice. So, that's the end of that.

John, near the beginning of the summer, was commenting about how he never keeps the same pen. He believes, "pens are universal. No one has their own, they belong to everyone."
= He said this numerous times so as a parting gift we got him a nice pen and a card. I wrote something like, "Thanks for all your advice this summer. Your humor and thoughtfulness was great in the morning and made the afternoon delightful (see a blog from a while ago)." It was funny, he got it. Anyway, he also gave all of us Moleskin books to write in . That was nice of him. I'll be sure to visit his class during next semester. I'm sure I'll always be in touch with him, asking him questions and bouncing ideas off of him. He was probably the best mentor in the whole program, and I was lucky to have him.

That's all for now. Kelly-girl and I are going to go see March of the Penguins . We saw Mad, Hot Ballroom yesterday. I'll write about the two in my next blog.

Peace outside.

P.S. Since the theme of this blog appears to be pics, here's one more: